Ivanka Trump, Samantha Bee, and the Strange Path of an Ancient Epithet

As the flap over Samantha Bee’s remark this week about Ivanka Trump reminded us, there is no sexist insult that can rival the C-word for coarseness and provocation. But why?

Photograph by Jessica Miglio / TBS

Last Sunday, Ivanka Trump, an adviser to the President, posted on Instagram an image of herself cuddling her young son, even as reports of families torn apart by the Trump Administration’s immigration policies flew around the Internet. On Wednesday night, as outrage continued to crest, the comedian Samantha Bee censured the President’s daughter on her TBS show, “Full Frontal.” “You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child,” Bee said, “but let me just say, one mother to another: do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt!”

Conservative pundits—Megyn Kelly, Liz Wheeler—lost their heads. The “Full Frontal” advertisers State Farm and Autotrader pulled out. The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, pronounced Bee’s language “vile and vicious,” adding that the “disgusting comments and show are not fit for broadcast, and executives at Time Warner and TBS must demonstrate that such explicit profanity about female members of this Administration will not be condoned on its network.” (This injunction, arriving from a government spokesperson, raised the spectre of censorship.) Spurious comparisons to Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett were drawn. At last, Bee issued an apology. “I would like to sincerely apologize to Ivanka Trump and to my viewers for using an expletive on my show to describe her last night,” she wrote. “It was inappropriate and inexcusable. I crossed a line, and I deeply regret it.” TBS echoed her contrition. “Samantha Bee has taken the right action in apologizing for the vile and inappropriate language she used about Ivanka Trump last night,” the network said. “Those words should not have been aired. It was our mistake too.”

Mistakes were made—by the Trumps, of course, and by Bee, for naïvely imagining that this narrative would not orient itself around her word choice the moment she let the “C” flag fly. (The President himself has since tweeted about “the horrible language” on Bee’s “low ratings show.”) She should not have apologized, and TBS should not have followed suit, and maybe none of us should ever have been born. And yet here we are, and the fact remains: there is no sexist insult that can rival “cunt” for coarseness and provocation, “inappropriateness” and “inexcusability.” Why?

There is, of course, the monosyllabic, Anglo-Saxon bluntness of it, a grunt clamped between consonants. “Fuck” has the same rough-hewn music. So, for that matter, does “Trump.” (“Trump That Bitch” was a popular chant and T-shirt slogan at Trump rallies during the 2016 Presidential race, but “Trump That Cunt” would have had the advantage of internal rhyme.) The term is combustive, hardened by centuries of misogyny, like prehistoric plant matter condensed into fossil fuel. When it emerged, in the thirteenth century, “cunt” was a literal and uncontroversial word for lady parts. As Forrest Wickman pointed out in 2013 (when yet another C-word scandal was rippling through the news), the vagina synonym featured in medieval surgery manuals. (“The neck of the bladder is short, and is made fast to the cunt.”) People had lively, descriptive names, like Bele Wydecunthe and Robert Clevecunt. A Londoner in the late thirteenth century might find herself wandering, warily, down Gropecuntelane, an artery of the city’s red-light district.

In the literature of the Middle Ages, Chaucer was the most famous writer to merrily invoke the C-word, or, in his case, the Q-word. His bawdy Wife of Bath promises, “You shall have quaint right enough at eve.” A character in “The Miller’s Tale” is a proto-Donald Trump: “he caught her by the quaint,” Chaucer writes. The term became more taboo over time—“a nasty name for a nasty thing,” Francis Grose called it, in “A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” from 1785—but for centuries it remained rakish rather than unspeakably insulting. In fact, it was even hot. Punning on “cunt” (punting?) became a flirtatious trope in erotic verse. Andrew Marvell’s seduction poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” published in 1681, features the sly lines “then worms shall try / that long preserved virginity, / and your quaint honour turn to dust.” John Donne fantasized about sucking on “country pleasures” in “The Good-Morrow,” an entry in his “Songs and Sonnets,” from 1633. Hamlet begs Ophelia’s permission to lie in her lap, assuring her that he will refrain from “country matters.” For most of its life, “cunt” and its variations were deliciously naughty, a form of linguistic lingerie, found in contexts of admiration, desire, even love.

Was it James Joyce who permanently bestowed upon it lasting associations with disgust and decay? The Dead Sea, Leopold Bloom believes, is “an old woman’s: the grey sunken cunt of the world.” In “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” McMurphy refers to Nurse Ratched—Mom gone monstrous—as a cunt. Agent Starling meets Hannibal Lecter in a prison full of predators, one of whom announces his depravity with “I can smell your cunt!” Except for a few marginal efforts to reclaim “cunt” as mysterious, potent, beautiful—see “The Vagina Monologues” and Nicki Minaj—years of sexist history have toxified it.

Almost inevitably, “cunt” has found Ivanka Trump, who is a lightning rod for rage against her father’s Administration. It discovered her by an almost matrilineal route: “from one mother to another,” Bee said, targeting Trump’s self-presentation as a devoted family woman, and tacitly acknowledging the path that most children take in entering the world. The President’s daughter has long smoothed his rough edges with her femininity; she does not project loudness, vulgarity, or a lack of control; whether she is gathering for her latest “women’s-empowerment summit” or embracing her youngest child in p.j.s, she is eternally Instagram-perfect. It is her complicity in her father’s agenda, most recently in policies that actively traumatize immigrant parents and children, that is obscene—far more than any four-letter word. It profanes and pulverizes any claim she might have on representing the interests of mothers and children. “Cunt” makes of womanhood something repugnant, and so does Ivanka, who embraces the shine and the softness of femininity at the same time that she rejects its bravery, love, and power.

For an Administration besotted by fantasies of its own persecution, any deviation from decorum or good taste will be taken as an excuse to brush aside the “haters.” The “Full Frontal” dustup has had the predictable consequence of forcing us to watch Ivanka Trump be cast as a victim. But only for show: she will never come close enough to disadvantage to smell its scent as she breezes by. The minor tragedy of Bee’s word choice is that it was destined to derail her legitimate critique. But why should the word have that power—or why can’t it have a different, positive power? In 2011, Jenny Diski wrote an entire essay for the Times Magazine about “cunt,” even though Times house style prohibited her from using the word or even partially shielding it with asterisks. Diski proposed that women “reappropriate it, take it back, make it ours, what with its being quite a good and descriptive word,” concluding, “I demand it back: my word for my private part, thank you very much.” In a similar spirit, following on the Bee controversy, a few famous women are defending the term’s honor, seeking to neutralize it as a linguistic third rail.

The etymological links between “cunt” and “country” feel relevant here, as they have since the United States elected a President who boasted of grabbing women “by the pussy” and a retaliatory tide of pink pussy hats swept across the land. We are accustomed to regarding our nations as sources of pride and our genitalia as sources of shame. The inversion of those norms would be only the latest fun-house effect of the Trump era.